If outward charms and temper sweet, The cheerful smile, the thought sublime, Could have preserved, she ne'er had met A change till death had sunk with time;' also the one on the _Death of Sir Isaac Newton_, wherein occur two memorable stanzas-- 'Great Newton's dead!--full ripe his fame; Cease vulgar grief, to cloud our song: We thank the Author of our frame, Who lent him to the earth so long. For none with greater strength of soul Could rise to more divine a height, Or range the orbs from pole to pole, And more improve the human sight.' His 'humorous elegies,' written in a mock heroic strain, and sometimes upon persons still living, though, for the purposes of his art, he represented them as dead, as in the case of John Cowper, are instinct with broad, rollicking, Rabelaisian fun. Their vivid portrayal of the manners and customs of the time renders them invaluable. What better description of the convivial habits of Edinburgh society early last century could be desired, than the graphic pictures in _Luckie Wood's Elegy_, particularly the stanza-- 'To the sma' hours we aft sat still, Nick'd round our toasts and sneeshin'-mill; Good cakes we wanted ne'er at will, The best of bread; Which aften cost us mony a gill To Aitkenhead.' Than his elegies on Luckie Spence, John Cowper, and Patie Birnie, no more realistic presentation of low-life manners could be desired. They are pictures such as Hogarth would have revelled in, and to which he alone could have done justice in reproduction. CHAPTER XI RAMSAY AS A SATIRIST AND A SONG-WRITER Difficult it is to make any exact classification of Ramsay's works, inasmuch as he frequently applied class-names to poems to which they were utterly inapplicable. Thus many of his elegies and epistles were really satires, while more than one of those poems he styled satires were rather of an epic character than anything else. By the reader, therefore, certain shortcomings in classification must be overlooked, as Ramsay's poetical terminology (if the phrase be permissible) was far from being exact.